However Contented
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Gears is happy. He’s beginning to get sick of it. G1, spoilers for Changing Gears.


**Title: **However Contented

**Author:** Tiamat's Child

**Rating: **G

**Warnings:** Consent issues

**Word count:** 1, 202

**Summary: **Gears is happy. He's beginning to get sick of it.

However Contented 

Gears was happy. He had always been happy. He would always be happy and he was always glad to oblige. He had been made that way. You could make people any way you wanted, and that was fine. There were such a lot of different people in the world and Gears was glad of that. It made him happy.

Most everything made Gears happy – it was so hard to decide what to do about it! But people would always tell him what to do. That made him happy too. He was glad to have work and he was glad to know what his work was and he was glad to do what he was told.

He was happy.

Then he met a bot.

The bot was different, she was worn and solid, and the angles that made her up had gone soft, and that made Gears happy. She didn't ask Gears for anything, she asked him questions about what he thought, and how he felt. Gears told the truth – he was happy, of course, he'd always been happy.

"Not everyone is," the bot told him, before she left again, chased away by one of the people in charge and Gears -

Well, Gears was happy, as he was always happy. But he began to wonder. What was it like to not be happy? It would be different – he couldn't imagine it, he didn't know how to imagine it, but he wanted to, suddenly, he wanted to very much, now that the idea was there, it was what he wanted.

The wanting made him happy, as all things did.

Being happy made it hard to think about anything other than what he'd been told to think about, but, he realized, he _could_ still think. He could think about anything he wanted to (this made him happy), he could think whatever he wanted about whatever he wanted to think about (this also made him happy), even if he couldn't do much about what he thought – he couldn't quite manage to do things unless someone asked (again, this made him happy). So he thought. And he thought hard, he thought through the happiness, even though it was everywhere, and he thought that he didn't want to be happy.

He didn't want to be happy. (This made him happy. He wished it didn't.)

So when the tallest, biggest mech he'd ever seen strode confidently in and asked him if he _wanted_ to be happy, he was more than ready to say no.

"No, and I'm very pleased you asked!" he said, because he was pleased. He was very happy to be questioned.

The mech nodded. "I know where to get a circuit that'll make it so you don't have to be," he told Gears.

Gears giggled. He couldn't help it. That was wonderful! He said so. "I'm very much obliged," he added.

The mech nodded again, with a quiet solemnity rare in Gears' experience, and went away.

And Gears was glad.

He was glad, too, when the mech did not come back. He did not come back for a long time, and Gears was happy. It was easy to be happy, but Gears remembered, and the remembering made him happy, and that let him know that he wished he wasn't happy and perhaps he would not always be so.

It made him something other than happy, although he was not sure what it was that he felt. He had never felt it before.

When the mech came back again it flared up, bright and hot, almost like a malfunction in his cooling system, but only almost like. It didn't hurt. It nearly drowned out his happiness.

"Here," the mech said, and drew him aside, out of the way and wind, "Here, I have the circuit."

The two of them together didn't find installing it hard, although Gears thought it was strange, the way that the mech's big hands were sure and steady, and somehow kind without being intrusive. He was there, and he helped, and that was all there was to it. He was happy about it, until the circuit was installed.

And then Gears wasn't happy.

Oh, somewhere he could feel something, some sort of capacity for happiness, but he wasn't lost in it, anymore, there were other things, things he'd never felt before, and he –

Wasn't glad.

Actually, he was annoyed. He was very annoyed. People had been taking advantage of him for years, and now he cared that they had been. The slag sucking – there wasn't a word foul enough, which was vastly irritating, and he was too small to beat them back down into convenient cubes of raw material bare handed, which was so disappointing there weren't words for it. Come to think of it, language was, in fact, vastly inadequate to describe the generally flawed nature of the universe.

Also, his knee hurt.

Gears brooded for a moment. The mech was watching him with concern – honestly, did he think Gears was going to break? Gears had done a lot more in his life than this guy knew about, and his frame hadn't snapped under the stress yet, amazing though that was!

Gears glowered at him, because he could. The mech did not glower back. Admittedly, it would have been hard for him to do so, seeing as how he didn't have a mouth, and a good glower was really all in the set of the mouth, but Gears didn't get the sense he even wanted to.

"Doing all right?" the mech asked.

"No," Gears said, because he wasn't, "But I'm better than I was," because after all, the mech had helped him. Now that Gears could think clearly and easily, out of the constant haze of happiness, he was pretty sure that doing so had been dangerous, and was still dangerous.

"My name is Optimus Prime," the mech said, "Will you come with me? I could use your help, if you'll give it."

Gears thought about that. It was so strange. He didn't have to fight to think about it, he just did. It was easy, now. He could think about where he wanted to go and who he was and if he wanted to help this person, whose name was Optimus Prime, and who had helped him.

"I'll ask a lot of you," Optimus Prime said, "But I'll never tell you how to feel."

Gears huffed. "You'll probably work me to death, that's what you'll do. I can feel my shoulder assemblies grating together in all the wrong places already."

Prime wasn't laughing, but Gears could see him thinking of laughing. There was a warmth in the set of his shoulders, in the movement of his hands as he held them up. "You've found me out."

"I thought so," Gears said, brisk and testy – it was so easy! He needn't be happy if he didn't want to be. "Come on, you'd think a mech with legs six times as long as mine could keep up!"

Prime did laugh, then, and caught up to Gears with no trouble at all.

It did not make Gears happy, but it could have, if he'd wanted it to.

And that, Gears thought, was good.


End file.
